In the next moment he was crossing the crowded room, all of Montecito there in their jewels and furs and cravats and nobody worried about the presumptive host of the party locked away in his room in the big house with the iron bars on the windows, not in the least, and it was no small wonder that he himself had been invited. Of course, he’d already seen the picture that afternoon with Mart and Mr. McCormick, but still he had to admit it was decent of Katherine — and Brush, he supposed — to include the nurses in a gathering like this. There were millionaires and tycoons here tonight and he was brushing shoulders with them, and not as somebody’s bootlick or bottle washer either — he was off-duty, a guest like anybody else. That was something, and he knew it and savored it, and he promised himself he’d be on his best behavior, smiling Eddie O‘Kane, quick with a handshake and a witty aside.
He caught up to Dolores at the buffet table, which was all piled up with good things from Diehl’s Grocery and two of Diehl’s best men in monkey suits back there to serve it up. She already had a Jack Rose cocktail in her hand with the long black velvet glove clinging to it like a second skin, and she was laughing at something one of the mustachioed little weasels was saying, her head thrown back, her pulsing white kiss-able throat exposed for anyone to see. It had been three days since he’d gotten to know her in the way that counted most, the way you could keep score by, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since — he didn’t know her phone number and he didn’t have a car to drive out to her place and nose around. But that was all right. It wasn’t love or anything like that he was feeling, but just a good healthy appetite for second helpings, and he didn’t want to seem overeager. Casual, that was the way he was, smooth as silk.
Still, when he saw the way she was laughing and the guy’s hand touching hers to drive home the joke — and what was so funny? — he couldn’t help bristling, though he knew he shouldn’t and that this wasn’t the place for it and that he had no more right to her than any half-dozen other men, and her husband not the least of them. “Dolores,” he said, in a throat-clearing sort of way, “I see you made it to our little gathering.”
She turned a face to him that was like a mask. His hand was throbbing. Was she going to cut him, was that it? The company too rich for him? Good enough for her in bed but not here amongst all these swells and capitalists? “Eddie,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, no inflection at all, “how nice to see you again.”
He started in on a little speech about Mr. McCormick, how he was indisposed and what a shame it was he couldn’t attend his own party, playing off the status of being Mr. McCormick’s intimate and puffing himself up as if he were the host and all this his, when the mustachioed character cut him off. “You’re a friend of Stanley’s?” the man said. “I knew him at Princeton,”
“Well, I—” O‘Kane stammered, and he felt himself sinking fast, over his head, out of his depth, and what was he thinking?
Dolores saved him. “My God, Eddie,” she gasped into the breach, “what did you do to your hand?”
He held it up gratefully, a white swath of bandage that was the sudden cynosure of the whole party, and invented an elaborate story about protecting Mr. McCormick from a deranged avocado rancher who objected to their crossing his property on one of their drives, brandishing it in the other man’s face as if challenging him to offer the slightest contradiction. And he felt good all of a sudden, not giving half a damn what the other guy thought or who he was or how much money he had: Dolores was on his side, which meant that she wanted her second helpings too. And from him, handsome Eddie O‘Kane, and not this penciled-in little twerp in the fancy-dress suit.
“What a shame,” she said, “about your hand, I mean.” And then she introduced the man in the mustache: “This is my brother-in-law, Jim — Tom’s brother. He’s visiting at the house for the week, and he’s just back from Italy, where he saw Tom—”
And then the talk veered off into news of the War in Europe and all the American volunteers over there and how the U.S. was sure to be drawn into it before long, and O‘Kane, bored with the whole subject, excused himself and went back to refresh his drink, figuring Dolores could come to him when she was ready. He found Mart still there, dissecting the Red Sox with an older gentleman whose jowls hung down on either side of his nose like hot water bags. “That Ruth’s a hell of a pitcher,” the old man was saying, lifting a glass to his lips, “and if Leonard and Mays hold up I don’t doubt for a minute we’ll be back in the World Series again this year.”
“But we’ve got no hitting,” Mart said. “It’s like a bunch of women out there, what I read anyway.”
“Well, you’re a bit off the beaten path out here, son, but you’re right there. We’ve got enough, though — and this fellow Gardner at third’s a good man, really capital….”
O‘Kane, fresh drink in hand, drifted away again, not even deigning to glance at Dolores now — he was as sure of her as he’d ever been of any girl or woman in his life — and hoping Katherine would leave early so he could loosen up a bit. But just a bit, he reminded himself, and he could hear his mother’s voice in his head: Use your manners, Eddie, and your nice smile, and that head God put on your shoulders, and you’ll go as far in life as you want to. He thought maybe he’d circulate a little, meet some people. Who knows — maybe he could pick up some tips on growing oranges or finding a piece of property with one of these oil wells on it or oil under the ground anyway, and how did anybody know it was there in the first place?
That was when the orchestra went Hawaiian, stiff old Mr. Eldred putting down his violin and picking up a ukulele that was like a toy and strumming away as if he were born in Honolulu. It was a surprise, and everybody cried out and clapped their hands as “Song of the Islands” somehow arose from his rhythmically thrashing right hand and the rest of the orchestra came tiptoeing in behind him. O‘Kane had been standing amid a group of regular-looking fellows who were heatedly debating the merits of a business that dealt in millimeters and centimeters of something or other, thinking he would wait for the appropriate moment to butt in and ask their opinion of the land offerings in Goleta, but as one they turned to the orchestra and began clapping in time to the ukulele.
He couldn’t really understand this Hawaiian craze — the music, to his ears, was as bland as boiled rice, nothing like the syncopated jolt of ragtime or jazz, which is what they ought to have had here and why couldn’t Eldred pick up a trumpet if he was going to pick up anything? No, the only good thing about Hawaii was the hula as danced by a half-naked brown-skinned girl in a grass skirt, and he’d seen a pretty stimulating exhibition of that one night at a sideshow in Los Angeles with Mart and Roscoe, who’d happened to borrow one of the Pierce automobiles for the evening and no one the wiser. “See the gen-u-wine article straight from the Islands! the barker had shouted. ”The gen-u-wine Hawaiian hula danced without the aid of human feet!“ That had been something and well worth the dime it had cost him.
But this, this was a farce. Inevitably, a whole chain of half-stewed men and big-bottomed women would get up and start swaying obscenely across the floor, making fools of themselves and stopping the conversation — the useful and potentially useful conversation — dead in its tracks. And sure enough, there they were already, and Eldred launching into “On the Beach at Waikiki” now, O‘Kane ordering another drink and looking on skeptically from behind the screen of Mart’s head, the old Red Sox fan right up there in front of the orchestra wagging his jowls like one of those big-humped cows from India. O’Kane didn’t care. He was enjoying himself anyway, a break from the routine, and the Ice Queen would tire of all this and go on back to her hotel soon, he was sure of it, and then he could fend off the little guys in the mustaches and let Dolores Isringhausen take him home in her car and do anything she wanted with him.